Bridge Between Japanese Popular Culture and Language Teaching
It has been challenging to maintain healthy enrollments in Japanese language courses at all college levels in the U.S. Although this problem is more serious in small liberal-arts colleges, state universities also have the same problem especially in their advanced Japanese courses. If we think about the prevalence of Japanese popular cultural products such as anime, manga, music, games, V-tubers, and traditional artifacts among college students in the United States, we cannot easily understand why the number of students who learn Japanese has been decreasing in many institutions.